Dozens of lawmakers team up to limit NSA surveillance

NSA director Keith Alexander, right, with James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)

Several members of Congress from Texas are supporting new legislation to curtail surveillance by the National Security Agency, after new allegations of US spying against foreign leaders emerged recently.

House and Senate leadership plan to formally introduce the legislation, called the USA Freedom Act, on Tuesday. The bill aims to cut sections of the Patriot Act, ending the NSA’s phone record storage and adding prohibitions to what information the government can collect from Americans.

The Patriot Act was passed in 2001 shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The bill was sponsored by Wisconsin Republican Jim Sensenbrenner – author of the original Patriot Act – in the House and Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy in the Senate. It has more than 50 co-sponsors, including Texas Democrats Gene Green, Sheila Jackson Lee and Beto O’Rourke, and Republican Michael Burgess.

It calls for reasonable grounds of national security interests or physical harm or intimidation before the government can obtain information “not concerning a United States person.”

The bill also requires an audit of the Department of Justice’s actions between 2010 and 2013, calling for the agency to examine and report any important information it has collected, and report it to Congressional intelligence committees by the end of 2014.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, railed against the spying revelations Monday, calling it a “big problem” that President Barack Obama claimed to have not known about the agency spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The House Intelligence Committee plans to meet Tuesday afternoon and could possibly discuss NSA reforms, at which NSA director Keith Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper are expected to testify.